A/N: Another nerve struck with that break up. Thank you all again for your feedback and for sticking with me! I'm realizing that my bar for a decent break up is very low IRL. I've lived through some doozies, so for me that was pretty civil, but I fully realize it was not ideal. I think maybe that's the point for me. Nick's not perfect and neither is Juliette, and now they both get to figure out who they want to be independently, even if they still have some issues to work out.

Anyway, meanwhile, at Dairy Queen...


The night is crisp, and the stars are bright. The waning moon is rising overhead—just full but already fading fast, glowing silver in the darkness. The air is rich with grease and sugar—gas and smoke—but under that it's damp and raw—full of the potential of growing things—of new life taking root—new leaves sprouting from old branches. It's spring in Portland, and the air is wild with it.

Adalind snuggles further into her stolen flannel jacket—something warm from Monroe's trunk that smells like wet dog in a surprisingly comforting way. They could have sat in the car of course, but she'd wanted to sit at the picnic tables—or on the picnic tables, anyway. It's one of the only early memories she has—sitting on these picnic tables—her little legs dangling between the tabletop and the seat—carefully licking a vanilla and chocolate twist half the size of her tiny head while her dad laughed—low and warm—and her mom scowled—playful and teasing. They'd loved each other once, she knows that. She remembers. That's what made the rest of it so hard. When he left. When her mom started scowling for real.

"Happy birthday," Rosalee says, and a chocolate blizzard monstrosity appears under Adalind's nose.

"Thank you." Adalind takes her blizzard while Rosalee settles on the table as well, bundled in her own flannel cocoon. Say what you like about Monroe's fashion sense, but it's certainly built for the fickle Portland spring weather. She raises her blizzard to Rosalee's and clinks the two together. "Cheers."

"Sláinte," Rosalee says, and then they dig into the ice cream in companionable silence.

Adalind's not sure what to say, to tell the truth. She only met Rosalee two days ago, and between the running around and the gun fight, they haven't exactly had time to bond, even though Adalind was willing to fight for the chance. There's something about Rosalee—something in her eyes that suggests she's seen too much but still seems to have found some sort of peace—and that calls to Adalind in ways she never would have expected. Adalind doesn't have a lot of regrets—she's never really seen the point—but she knows that she's on a different path now and that the one she's leaving behind had a lot worth regretting. It's a little annoying that the both paths seem to be so tied to her romantic partners, but she's never been shy about being drawn to powerful men and a vision that she can execute, so she's not sure there's any point in getting coy about it now.

It's not that she couldn't come up with her own vision for the future if she had to—she knows she could. She's more than a little worried that Nick's desire to share a future with her will vanish in the face of breaking up with Juliette, and part of her is tempted to run for Austria right now and take her chances with the Royals and their revolving door of princes instead. She could do it. She'd be good at it even, and it might even be fun to run circles around the Royal court and see where it takes her. But that's not a future so much as an amusement, and when she thinks about Nick and Diana and Switzerland, she can see it just as clearly as Nick seems to. It's his vision—his idea—but he needs her to flesh it out. To make it real. And that's the proverbial cherry on top.

She might have followed him anyway—might have been happy to be his baby momma and not much else—but the idea of building more than just a family with him—building a better life for all of the wesen of Portland—well, that gets her almost as hot as his dark eyes. She thinks of all the men she's dated—slept with—all the men who bought her flowers and chocolate and diamonds, never guessing her true desire: A problem to solve. A system to build. Something to create and fix and run from the shadows like the mastermind she is. All those men, and not one of them ever thought to bring her an administrative cluster fuck. Not until Nicholas Burkhardt.

"What are you grinning about over there? Should I be worried?"

Adalind turns her grin to Rosalee, who has one eyebrow raised and a wary expression.

"Nick says you're the most dangerous when you're smiling," Rosalee says.

"Nick is correct," Adalind says, still grinning. "Rosalee, what do you think about Switzerland?"

"Fondue and gold—hopefully not at the same time—oh, not that Switzerland. That's what you and Nick are calling it, right? The neutrality deal you were talking about with Ian? Independent Portland—no Royals, no Resistance, no fighting in the streets, yeah?"

"Yeah." Adalind looks closer at Rosalee, who's very focused on her ice cream all of a sudden. "What do you think?"

Rosalee sighs and puts her ice cream aside, meeting Adalind's gaze again with sharp eyes.

"I think the Wesen Council is going to have a lot to say about it, and since I'm probably going to be the one to manage that line of communication, I'm wondering if it's worth it."

Adalind sits with that for a moment. It's not that she hasn't thought about the Council—everyone has to think about the Council eventually—it's just that with the Royals and the Resistance actually on the ground in Portland, it'd been easy to relegate them to being background players until this precise moment.

"You're in communication with the Council?"

Rosalee shrugs. "It's a family thing. My dad was the contact for Portland, and then my brother, and now...there's me."

Adalind stares at Rosalee, impressed in spite of herself. She'd been intrigued by Rosalee before—called by the pain and the peace in her eyes—but now maybe she's a little bit smitten, too. She's never met a power broker she didn't want to know better, after all.

"Huh," Adalind says. "Neat."

"I haven't told them about Nick yet. I don't know what to tell them, actually. Independent Grimms are rare, and most of them are constantly on the move. The Council's never had to think about what might happen if a Grimm were to settle down, choose a territory, and decide to defend it. It just hasn't happened before. Not that I know of, anyway. And the infrastructure that it's going to take—the community buy-in—it's so much. Too much for one Grimm. It'd have to be—"

"A team," Adalind says. "An independent Grimm and a bastard Royal and a Council contact and a vegan blutbad and a Kehrseite cop and a witch or two with a reason to play nice and maybe even a magic Grimm baby with superpowers, just for the fun of it. That's about what it would take, right?"

"Now that you mention it…" Rosalee grins. "Yeah, probably exactly that. That's what it's going to take."

"What a happy coincidence," Adalind says, with a matching grin. "Rosalee, how would you like to Chair a tribunal?"


They talk about Switzerland for a long time—plans and dreams and realities—interim measures and democratic elections and key wesen communities with concerns that they can work with, connections they can build, favors they can trade. This is the work—the part that Nick is going to be useless about because he didn't grow up here—in Portland or in the Wesen world. This is the part he needs help with, and Adalind is delighted to find herself talking shop with a co-conspirator with more than half a clue about the political landscape they'll be facing and a fair few ideas about how to navigate it. She was prepared to go it alone, but having Rosalee for a partner in this—it's so much better than she expected.

"Thank God," Adalind says. "Thank God you're here. Nick knows nothing about all of this—I've just been spinning out scenarios in my head, hoping I've got a handle on all of the players and knowing I must be missing something. It's going to be so much better, being able to bounce ideas off you—being able to do this together."

"Well, don't count your chickens, yet," Rosalee says, a tease of a smile around her lips. "I might turn out to be a huge pan in the ass, and then you'll try to kill me."

Adalind shrugs. It's not outside the realm of possibility.

"I think we could say that about anyone on the team," Adalind says. "We're all deadly. Our arguably weakest link is Hank, and he brings a pistol to bed. I think that's our biggest selling point. We're all killers, and we're all saying, 'Enough. Enough is enough. No more bloodshed in our town, not without a good reason.'"

"A reason that multiple, independent people agree is a good reason," Rosalee adds.

"Right," Adalind says. "It's not foolproof, but it beats the hell out of Nick and Monroe squirrelled away in the trailer making a call and hoping it doesn't get them killed or noticed by the Verrat. So, you know, it's enough. And you're safe with me if I'm safe with you. Even when we annoy each other. Even when we think the other party is being needlessly difficult. That's all we can ask of each other, really. We don't kill over petty shit. And if it gets serious, we try to resolve it with words before we try to end it with violence."

Rosalee stares at Adalind, arms wrapped around one knee that's bent into her chest, head tilted, like she's looking at Adalind again for the first time.

"You don't do half-measures, do you? You're all in on this. On Nick—Switzerland—the baby—everything. You had a completely different life two days ago, but now you're here and you're all in already, aren't you?"

"Pretty much."

"How?" Rosalee asks. "I've known Nick and Monroe for a month, and I'm still trying to figure out how I ended up here. It's been slow and steady, but I still have moments when I think, 'Is this really my life now? Did I really sign up for this?' You've been here less than forty-eight hours. How on earth do you make sense of that?"

Adalind looks up at the waning moon. It was full on the night she and Nick met in the forest, and already it's changing—spinning on in the cosmos—never pausing at its peak, always moving forward, always turning. There's a lesson there—one she's been learning all her life. One she'll be learning for years to come. There's more than one reason she wants to name her daughter after a moon goddess.

"I don't know if I'm looking for sense," Adalind says. "Nick's across town right now breaking up with a woman he was hoping to propose to not that long ago. There's no sense to be found in that. No rational sense. If he thought about it, he'd never do it. I can feel him—feel what he feels. He's not thinking about it. He knows. He knows in his gut that this is what he needs to do. That he's meant to be with me instead. And that's not sense. It's magic, or something like it. It's instinct—primal, gut instinct—and I feel it, too. So I'm not interested in making sense of it. Sense makes no sense. It can't. Not when it comes to this."

"Huh. That helps actually. Thank you."

Rosalee is looking up at the moon now, too, and Adalind wonders if she's thinking about a wolf.

"So," Adalind says, grinning again. "You and Monroe? Tell me everything."

Rosalee snorts and turns back to Adalind with a shrug.

"I don't know," she says. "It's only been a month, and it makes no sense, and not all of us have the luxury of jumping each other because wild magic in the woods made us do it, you know?"

"But you feel it," Adalind says. She's been in the same room as Monroe and Rosalee. It would be impossible not to feel it, even over the radio static of her constant attraction to Nick.

"Yeah," Rosalee says with a soft, sweet smile that makes Adalind realize that she's never had a friend quite like Rosalee before. "Yeah, I really do."